Fatal Attraction

Thirty years ago, Nancy Milford wrote a now-famous biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, one of the fabled bad girls of American literary bohemia. The book is remarkable for the power with which it brings to life the disorder of the soul that plagued the Fitzgeralds--how loved they were for it!--and the depth with which Milford lets us see how trapped in it was Zelda Fitzgerald. While he could make literature out of the panic they shared, she, the raw material, could only be consumed by it. She had been adored for the chaos within: It was her gift and her karma. There never was anything for it but to go on being outrageous to the bitter unthinkable end.

At the very same time that Zelda was riding the crest of her extraordinary wave, another famous bad girl of American arts was riding hers. True, this one is known to us not as the companion to the talent but the talent itself; yet it’s a good bet that she may take her place finally in the pages of cultural rather than literary history just as Zelda has. Talented but madly bohemian, Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her glory years, was better known for her capacity to arouse the national fantasy about free love and reckless living than for her poetry. She was, as Nancy Milford--now her biographer--tells us, “the first American figure to rival the personal adulation of Byron.” Millay, in fact, drew the same kind of crowds that Byron drew: “Her performing self made people feel they had seen the muse alive and just within reach .... [S]he not only brought them to their feet, she brought them to her. In the heart of the Depression her collection of sonnets ‘Fatal Interview’ sold 35,000 copies within the first two weeks of its publication.” This wasn’t because America had become a nation of poetry lovers.

Edna Millay was born in 1892 and grew up, in hardship and in beauty, on the coast of Maine, one of three daughters of a poor independent-minded mother (a wig-maker and visiting nurse) who, in 1900, told an incapable husband to get out and set about raising her daughters alone. Cora Millay was an original: tough, smart, literate; inside her rough edges a romantic burning with odd ambition for her girls if not for herself: “I had a chip on my shoulder for them. It is a vicarious thing to live on the edge of everything, but with the parent against the world it is stronger yet .... [T]hey always had a line out to the beautiful and the tragic .... I let the girls realize their poverty: I let them realize what every advantage cost me in the effort to live.”

They adored her inordinately--in her company, the ardor not for life but of life became a formative experience--and within the psyche of each girl this adoration for the mother wove itself into an unusual family romance. In the ‘20s, in Greenwich Village, people watched Cora Millay and her three daughters rambling about together, raptly involved with one another, a little band of countrywomen hitting the big city, looking like some eerie version of “Little Women.” Inside the originality and high spirits something secret, mocking, untouchable: They were for one another as they would be for no one else, a prefiguration of all the loneliness to come.

Of course, at the beating-heart center was Edna--always Edna. They were there because of Edna; because Edna had written a famous poem (“Renascence”) at 20, received the support of a rich patron, gone to Vassar and then, in the spring of 1917, come to New York to begin her amazing career of poetry and seduction. As Malcolm Cowley remembered it, “They were each lovely girls. But Edna ... [s]he’d break your heart. There was something wild and elusive about her.”

She’d been that at 12, she’d be that at 40: wild and elusive. Or, rather, intent on making people experience her as wild and elusive. This was the thing, always, at the heart of her character and of her work: her bold need for self-dramatization. Edmund Wilson put it best, and for countless others, when he described meeting her--again in the Village, in the ‘20s--at a party where she was reading her poems. Her voice, he said, was absolutely thrilling. It gave her the “power of imposing herself on others through a medium that unburdened the emotions of solitude. The company hushed and listened as people do to music--her authority was always complete .... She was one of those women whose features are not perfect and who in their moments of dimness may not seem even pretty, but who, excited by the blood or the spirit, become almost supernaturally beautiful.”

Dorothy Thompson--who knew Millay in Budapest at the height of her fame, on a trip to Europe--put it another way: “She was a little bitch, a genius, a cross between a gamin and an angel .... She sat before the glass and combed her lovely hair, over and over. Narcissan. She really never loved anyone except herself .... I had to go back to Vienna and left her the toast of half the town. Handed her all I had because she was an angel .... She might have left Josef [Thompson’s husband] alone, but not that, either.”

It had nothing to do with sensuality, everything to do with the romantic exercise of will: a will bent on inducing lifelong yearning in those around her. The magnetism lay in a triumph of attitude that had been hers since girlhood. She saw herself as linked to a higher destiny. In the poems she would often, with spice and daring, pronounce those she seduced ennobled, because they had been loved and left by her . They should all, she felt, be proud to have served the higher cause--the sheer intensity--of her self-devotion.

Nothing and no one mattered except the intensity. How to keep it alive became the central question of her life. The answer, of course, was always the same: to drink, sleep around and make art--nonstop. Before she was through, there’d been countless men in her bed, a few thousand drinks under her belt and more money made from the writing of poetry than any other American poet had seen before or, perhaps, since. The fame came because her need to be herself at all costs meshed perfectly with the needs of the time. In a profile of her in The New Yorker in 1925, the writer explains why hers is the voice of the moment: “[T]he poems celebrate the loves of [the] footloose .... The only genuine surrender is to death .... It is the only intensity available after a love that has burned on nothing but itself”; the writer goes on to observe that the generation that had just gone to war “had seen nothing so accurate about itself in print.”

This poet, once so beloved, is entirely unknown today. We do not read her work or, if we do, we experience very little of what was experienced during her lifetime. If you ask why this is so, the answer will probably be, “They’re sentimental.” By which is meant, not that Millay’s formality or subject matter or attitudes are out of fashion but, rather, that the poems simply do not go deep enough. The material is not sufficiently transformed. If it was, it will be said, none of the rest would matter. The poems would then be news that stayed news, as Ezra Pound said enduring literature must.

Yet, as a figure, Edna Millay compels. Something in her life signifies. It occured to me, reading Milford’s biography, that she was, not the Byron of her day but, more accurately, the Anne Sexton of her day. Another amazing seducer-through-poetry whose public readings drove people wild but whose work now--alone on the page, 30 years later, without the special pleading of a live performance--has much less impact than it did when the collective reader could feel, behind the words, the stirring presence of the actor-poet. In the flesh, these two literary vamps both generated a powerful allure--to which they themselves became addicted--that spread the reputation of the poems far and wide. As a result, they hungered to remain vamps forever and, in fact, never progressed, either of them, in the life or in the work, beyond this urgency. But there is more to it than that. In each case the vamping can now be seen as a harbinger of some internal nihilism--that which is determined to eat itself alive--and it is this that holds our attention.

These women were possessed of a blazing, raging, murderous extremity--an extremity so brilliant, so driven, so unforgiving as to seem metaphoric. Compelled to consume all that comes its way, inevitably it consumes itself. Sylvia Plath might be added to their number--certainly she died for the rage, not the poetry--and, of course, there was Zelda Fitzgerald. The disparities in literary talent among them notwithstanding, they are all vivid examples of a kind of willed temperamental outrage at having been born into ordinary human damage. They’d be damned if they’d submit--and they were.

Between one famously bad girl and another, Nancy Milford has spent her entire professional life among the questions such lives give rise to, questions that a biographer need not, indeed cannot, answer but must embody. In the case of “Zelda,” this requirement is wholly realized; in the case of “Savage Beauty,” Milford is less successful. “Zelda” is a haunting book because in it Milford connected deeply with her subject. Here, with Millay, that depth of connection eludes her, leaving us with a thoroughly respectable piece of work but not an inspired one. With Millay, a confusion occurred between the work and the persona, whereas with Zelda no such confusion was possible. Once Milford begins calling Millary a great poet--as she does from early on--the line of insight that might have strengthened this book fails to clarify.

Nancy Milford knows that trapped in the lives of these rather fabulous creatures is a piece of glory and sorrow on the grand scale. The social and sexual anarchy to which both Millay and Fitzgerald were seriously devoted is a measure of deep-seated alienation, the kind that no experience can influence. Hard, mean and immutable, it inflicts an intolerable loneliness, and indeed the loneliness can not be tolerated.

Sexton and Plath killed themselves and Zelda Fitzgerald went mad; Millay, on the other hand, perhaps the most complicated of the lot, devised an ending for herself all the more interesting. In the last part of her life, she lived alone, with her revering husband, in a rural retreat called Steepletop, a lovely estate, three hours from New York, created solely to serve Edna’s art. But as time went on, and the power of her youthful beauty evaporated, it was her melancholy not her art that was served. She retreated steadily into booze and drugs. Her husband, insistent upon the genius in his keeping, continued to keep the house in perpetual readiness for Edna’s muse. As they waited, the place grew shabbier and shabbier. She fell into morphine addiction, so did he, less and less did they leave home, and at last they were both buried alive in what had become an eerie fantasy of the life they were waiting to live. In short: Steepletop became Sunset Boulevard.

If Milford had concentrated on this self-created isolation in Edna Millay, used it as an organizing principle, she would, I believe, have had an even greater success than “Zelda.” Existential in character, devastating in its consequence, it could not have failed to arouse our sympathy for the emotional ambition at the heart of so much distress.

WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED, AND WHERE, AND WHY

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there sits a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

From “The Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” edited by Nancy Milford (The Modern Library: 168 pp., $16.95)